Pennsylvanian Mark Ely wins 2017 Fantasy Fishing contest

Mark Ely of Downington, Pa., has achieved some measure of success on the water, winning the Angler of the Year title of the Chester County Bassmasters, a B.A.S.S. Nation club, in 2013, 2015 and 2017. What happened in 2014 and 2016? He and his wife had children those years, so he might’ve been a little bit preoccupied at home.

He’d won a few bucks here and there over the years as a result of his skill with a rod and reel, but this year’s winnings were far and away the best yet, because in addition to his club AOY bragging rights, B.A.S.S. also awarded him a Triton 189 TrX paired with a Yamaha VF150LA outboard, a MotorGuide X3 24 volt trolling motor and a Lowrance Mach 5 depthfinder, as well as a $500 gift card from Bass Pro Shops – and he didn’t have to make a cast to do it. Instead, he claimed the massive prize package from behind a keyboard, by beating nearly 35,000 other competitors in the season-long Bassmaster Fantasy Fishing Contest.

Ely, 33, works on financial system architecture in the pharmaceutical industry, and described himself as numerically oriented, noting that “I definitely liked the math portion of the SAT better than the reading portion.” Nevertheless, he claimed not to have some secret algorithm or team of quants helping with him his pre-tournament analysis. Instead, he relied on a fairly simple system involving “floor placement.”

“That means that I wasn’t just looking for who was most likely to win, but also who was likely not to fall out of the top 40 or 50,” he said. “On Wednesday nights, after the registration meetings, I’d watch a lot of social media videos. Sometimes those are helpful, especially the videos by the anglers’ roommates.”

He’s also a superfan, a self-described “bass junkie” who spends plenty of time working, with his family, fishing, and cheering on the Eagles, Sixers and Phillies – but also a borderline unhealthy number of hours on Bassmaster.com, various fishing forums and watching YouTube videos. He was a Marshal at the Elite Series event on the Chesapeake Bay in 2015, and rode one day with a tour rookie named Seth Feider who he ended up picking three times this year. Feider repaid the favor by producing fourth-, 13th- and 34th-place finishes in those derbies.

Ely endured missteps along the way, but none of them were big enough to derail his title chase. Each Wednesday night immediately prior to an event at about 10 p.m. he’d go back through the brackets and reassess his earlier picks. Normally he’d leave them alone, but at one tournament early in the year he swapped out an angler who ended up with in the top five finishers for one who ended up 70-something at the conclusion of the tournament.

He picked Justin Lucas five times during what turned out to be the young pro’s worst season on tour (he ended up 64th in the AOY race), but those five picks included all four of Lucas’s regular season money finishes. Ely’s chances were buoyed by the fact that he picked three tournament winners, including Jacob Wheeler at Cherokee, Aaron Martens at Champlain and Jordan Lee at the Classic.

Future fantasy fishing title aspirants may be interested to note that Ely typically did not consult the ownership percentages in a given tournament’s brackets. He feared that “trying to outsmart everybody” added an unnecessary wrinkle to the picking process, and therefore it “was not part of my equation.”

With four tournaments left to go he’d dropped out of the single digits, from eighth to 16th. He’d managed to climb back into fourth place in time for the AOY Championship on Mille Lacs, but he knew that with a field of only 50 anglers it would be hard to make a move. His team – Wheeler, Feider, Steve Kennedy, Clifford Pirch and Jonathon VanDam – all performed admirably, and he’d somehow vaulted the other three contestants to lead by 100 points or so heading into the final day of competition.

Even then, Steve Kennedy’s non-functioning BASSTrakk caused Ely, sitting over 1,200 miles away, no shortage of consternation throughout the day. When the last fish hit the scales, his victory became semi-official, and when the standings were finally updated a few hours later, reality hit home.

Ely’s prize package from B.A.S.S. had a suggested retail value of nearly $38,000, and he agreed that the 18 1/2-foot Triton, plus the Bass Pro Shops gif card are fabulous prizes.

Despite his recent success, Ely claimed that he had never done particularly well in prior attempts to conquer the Fantasy Fishing mountaintop. “I’m not trying to make fantasy into a full time profession, although this year it could have been,” he said. He’ll go on picking anglers the way that he always has, with a combination of intuition, math and a bit of inside knowledge gained through intense study of the competitors’ personalities.

“Some people are serial sandbaggers and some are serial optimists,” he said, putatively referring to the Elite Series pros, but he might well have been talking about his chances of a repeat. Ely’s keeping it close to the vest, but he seems to have this game down to a science.